Menu
County to begin placement of new road signs
By Ralph Pokorny
Nevada Daily Mail
Jayhawker, Osage, Abolitionist, Pawhauska, and Rebel are just a few of the hundreds of names along with numbers from one to 3,100 printed on reflective green signs that will soon be sprouting on gray metal posts at all the road intersection in Vernon County.
"We are waiting to hear from Dig Right," Vernon County Presiding Commissioner David Darnold, told the Vernon County Local Emergency Preparedness Committee, Wednesday.
The commission sent a map to Dig Right to find out if there any underground pipelines or wires that could be hit when they drive the post in the ground.
That is all that is standing in the way of Vernon County's completing the first step in getting a countywide E-911 system in place.
Darnold said that the county commission hopes to have a ceremonial installation of the first road sign in the extreme northwest corner of the county in a few weeks.
When the new signs are installed it will no longer be necessary to offer directions such as "turn left at the Old Jones farm, where no one named Jones has lived for 50 years, then turn right at the red barn with a hog lot. The Smiths live in the green house with a blue barn with a cornfield. If you come to a green house with a blue barn with no cornfield, you have gone too far," for example.
All that will be needed is to say that the Smiths live at 200 Abolitionist, and it will be easy to locate the house in the northwest corner of the county.
East-west roads will have names and the north-south roads will use numbers.
The roads within the first mile south of the county line will have names starting with A and will be incremented by one letter for each mile you travel south.
The numbers on the north-south roads will start with 100 and will be incremented by 100 for each mile to the east.
Neal Gerster, southern commissioner, said that they did not use any names beginning with X. Instead, they used names starting with W for two miles instead of one mile.
Darnold said that they tried to use historical names where they could; however, some of them were too long to fit the signs and in other cases, like Pump House Road or Dog Pound Road, the traditional names could not be used because they did not fit into the pattern the county adopted for naming its roads.
Roads beginning with the letter P will be located south of Nevada instead of north of town, where Pump House Road is; and since Dog Pound Road runs north and south, it will have to have a number.
Gerster said that the naming process was much easier for the county than it would be for a town like Nevada to rename its streets with 150-year-old names, with this kind of name and number grid system.
"We had no names, so we could just name them and take the flak," he said.
Darnold said that the county has not done any addressing yet. That will be done after the signs are up.
The cost for the county to do this has been minimal, since they have received several grants to cover most of the cost of project, along with some assistance from the Missouri Department of Transportation.
Most of the installation of the signs will be paid for with a grant from Workforce Development, although there will be some expense for the use of the county's road and bridge crews and trucks, Darnold told the LEPC.
The county bought their own sign making equipment and will be able to easily make replacements when signs are damaged or stolen.
Darnold said that they have told the towns in the county that they can make signs for them as well for at cost, which is about $5 each, when there is time.
This naming system will make it much easier for an emergency response agency to respond to a call.
Darnold said that it would be easy to print up map books that will show the roads.
"I think you'll like this," Gerster said.